Shell Programming and Scripting

If this has still "too many arguments" then combine with find

Code:

find . -name "star_st*" -exec awk '/1175 876330/;{nextfile}' {} +

This find . -name star_st* -exec head -1 {} + | grep "1175 876330" gives output however, this awk '$0 ~ /1175 876330/ {nextfile}' star_st* does not show any Output

Put a ; or a <newline> after the /.../. This is about 50% faster on my machine.

That is strange, before you said that:

Code:

find . -name star_st* -exec head -1 {} + | grep "1175 876330"

gave you a syntax error (which it would unless you ran it in a directory where there is no more than one file with a name starting with star_st). We told you before that the -name primary's argument has to be quoted to work properly.

I see that RudiC has already explained that I didn't put that newline in the middle of my awk script just of the fun of it.

@MadeInGermany: I was testing your suggestion verses that of Don Cragun's find . -name "star_st*" -exec head -1 {} + | grep "1175 876330"

I check if the result is found or not using if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then

I m not able to test n compare the performace of both as MadeInGermany's command always passes the condition of $? -eq 0 even if there are no results found. May be you [MadeInGermany] can provide a fix there ?

---------- Post updated at 09:18 AM ---------- Previous update was at 09:11 AM ----------

ok, I put a ; but it gives me error

Code:

awk '$0 ~ /1175 876330/; {nextfile}' star_st*
bash: /bin/awk: Argument list too long

---------- Post updated at 09:23 AM ---------- Previous update was at 09:18 AM ----------

I am sorry Don i meant "star_st*" and not star_st*

Pipe to grep, that gives an exit status

Code:

find . -name "star_st*" -exec awk '/1175 876330/;{nextfile}' {} + | grep ^

Just to be clear, if the command:

Code:

find . -name "star_st*" -exec awk '/1175 876330/;{next file}' {} +

yields exit status 0, all of the files with names starting with star_st were successfully processed by awk and the directory containing them was successfully processed by find, but it doesn't tell you if any lines were written to standard output while processing those files.

On the other hand, the commands:

Code:

find . -name "star_st*" -exec awk '/1175 876330/;{nextfile}' {} + | grep ^

and:

Code:

find . -name "star_st*" -exec awk '/1175 876330/;{next file}' {} + | fgrep 1

(which might or might not be slightly faster) will give you an exit status that indicates if grep or fgrep successfully printed a line read from find and awk (exit status 0), hit end-of-file before reading a line from the pipeline (exit status 1), or had some internal error (exit status greater than 1). It will tell you absolutely nothing about whether or not find or any of the awk commands it executed completed successfully or failed.

Some versions of some shells generate an array that contains the exit status of all elements of the latest pipeline executed, but every shell that provides it does it differently and many shells don't do it at all.

We can use subshells to save the exit status of each element of a pipeline that will work with any POSIX conforming shell, if that is what you need. So, please explain exactly what information you need to capture from the exit status of the pipeline elements.